An Osprey with Skills

During nesting season and the period when they are raising chicks, the male osprey fishes for the family.  He will catch a fish and take it to a tree where he will eat the front half of the fish.  Once he is done, he will take the remainder to the female and give it to her to eat.  Seems to me, she gets the better half of the deal but, hey, what do I know?  In this first image, the male is flying around with the fish in it's talons.  Not much of a fish, but still...  As is often the case, he flew right over me, looking me over. I'm not sure if they do that because they are fearful I may take it from them or they're bragging or what. I just know that even if they have the whole river to fly over, they will make a pass or two over my location and give me that bug-eyed stare.  I finally realized that the reason they fly around so much after catching a fish is to allow time for the fish to expire.  Try to imagine attempting to land on a tree branch with a wiggling, slippery fish in your paw and you can understand why.

Finally, though, the male lands in a tree to eat the fish.  You can see the fish under his right foot. This sycamore is within eyesight of the nesting box and pretty much at the same level as the nest, so he gets to keep an eye on his mate while he is eating.  It lets her know how soon she will be eating and it also allows him to defend the nest against aggressors.  I watched him chase an eagle away the other day that intentionally flew just over the nest to check it out. 

The nesting box is at the top of an electrical pole and was erected last year by the electric company. More about that in another post.  There are a lot of people that like to walk along this road, enjoying the view of the river and marsh while getting some exercise.  The female doesn't like people walking under her nest and will get to complaining when they do.  There isn't much that can be done about it. They chose this location and they are going to have to put up with the activity.  I don't think she liked me being on the dock either.  In this image, she is staring directly at me, but I am probably a couple hundred feet from the nest.  Does she have eggs?  I would expect that she does. 

When the male was done eating, he flew what was left of the fish over to the nest, landed and gave it to her.  She took it in her mouth and did something I have never seen before.  She took off and flew with the fish in her beak instead of in her talons.  I'm not sure if she did that without thinking it through or what, but after she got airborne, she decided she really should be carrying the fish in her talons, and tucked her head under her body while flying and transferred the fish to her claws.  After having never seen this before, on the following day, I saw her do exactly the same thing.  So, take a good look at the one with the fish in her mouth because you don't hardly ever see that.

Say "Cheese"

I always go down to the river hoping that I will come away with at least one photo that exceeds my hopes for capturing something memorable.  In my mind, it becomes my 'photo of the day.'  Days where I capture several are bonus days.  This recent morning was a bonus day.  What more could you ask for -great lighting, a nice graceful landing pose, undistracting background, and a little sprig of wisteria adding a little (spring) seasoning.

Downy Woodpecker

We have a lot of downy woodpeckers that come to the feeder.  I blend in a special woodpecker mix of seeds and nuts that keep them coming back.  Actually, it looks so good, I've been tempted to try it myself.  It includes bits of dried fruit and even exotic nuts like cashews.  I have never found a well-balanced commercial mix of foods that will attract a wide variety of birds, so I mix my own.

There are a couple of nearby trees that the woodpeckers like to go to that have little "shelves" where they can open a seed without dropping it.  It is usually where a branch has broken off and left a small hole in the side of the tree.  The red-bellies do this too, but they use a different tree.  In this image, I decided to remove the distracting background and simply show the tree (a river birch) and the bird.

Boat Traffic

While waiting for birds to do something on the river, I often will take photos of boats as they pass by.  Occasionally, I have the opportunity to get their email address and mail the pictures to the boat owner, which I am glad to do.  I figure not too many people have pictures of something they enjoy doing, since boating photos have to be set up in advance for the most part.

This is actually a commercial or "working" boat, so I don't think they would have cared, but I would see them on many mornings I was standing there.  On this particular morning, they were passing just as the sun crested the horizon, spotlighting the boat due to a hole in the clouds.  It is one of my favorite boating photos.

A Serendipity Shot

While this isn't much of a photo, there is a funny story behind it.  I had gotten to the beach at North Beach (a town on the edge of the Chesapeake) before sunrise so I could be set up to shoot the sunrise when it occurred.  Crossing the beach to the spot where I wanted to set up, I didn't see another soul anywhere.  Not only did I have the camera and telephoto on a tripod, I had also brought a small collapsible stool to sit on.

I was readying the camera and hadn't been there more than a minute or two when I heard a fairly loud distinct noise directly behind me.  Since I hadn't seen anything only a moment earlier, it startled me and I quickly looked back over my shoulder to see what could have made the noise.  There were three Canada geese standing there looking at me only a few feet away and it was as though they were asking me if it was okay if they passed me in that nasally voice that (even domestic) geese make. Stupid geese!  If they had just walked by me, I would have never even known they were there.

I decided to try to get a picture of them, but there were a couple of problems.  I had a telephoto mounted on the camera and, I knew if I did much moving around, they would spook and I wouldn't get the picture.  So, without moving, I simply rotated the camera on the tripod in their direction and tripped the shutter remotely, trying to estimate where to point the lens.  It was then I realized the shutter speed was going to be way too long.  I think it ended up being something like twenty seconds.

Amazingly, I did catch one goose and it moved very little in that twenty seconds.  Yeah, there is a little ghosting of it's upper body, but you can make out what it is.  But, it became an altogether different photo after it was finished.  I was also using a blue and gold polarizer, one of the few filters that can produce effects that just cannot be "digitally" reproduced in a photo editing program.  It enhanced both the warmth of the street lights and the blue light of the water.  And, because the shutter speed was so slow, the water became a pleasing blur, ending up looking almost painterly.

Doom and Gloom

This photo was taken just a couple of miles from my house.  The reason I mention that is because I had been waiting for a nice sunny sunrise to take a particular picture I had in mind.  It looked like this was the morning to realize "my vision."  I jumped in my car and headed up the road.  How long does it take to drive two miles?  A couple of minutes, right?  By the time I got to the farm, the skies had begun to cloud over just that quick.  I realized I wasn't going to get the shot I came for, but I thought I would "work the scene" anyway since I was already there.

The vultures on the roof of the barn naturally caught my eye.  Vultures have that aura of doom and gloom since they are always looking for dead stuff.  There were actually about five of them and they
were coming and going at irregular intervals.  There are three in this photo although one is no more than a bump in the roof line.  I've always liked the image; my wife doesn't.  Oh well, there is no accounting for taste...

If You Saw It, You Missed It

With an single lens reflex camera, the mirror has to move out of the image path when the shutter is opened.  In that split second, as you are looking through the lens, your view is blocked by the mirror.  If you are trying to capture something that occurs very quickly, you have to anticipate (think "guess") when that will happen.  If you are seeing it through the lens, then you are not recording it on the sensor.  In other words, you missed it.

You can compensate for this somewhat by shooting a burst of several frames, but that doesn't always work either.  Once the camera's buffer fills, it stops taking any more frames until there is more room in the buffer (which can seem like an eternity while you are waiting).  So if the action you are trying to capture doesn't occur until after the burst ends, you still miss it.

And then there are things that you just can't anticipate.  When an osprey catches a fish, it will often pause in flight and shake like a dog to shake off excess water.  They have to have enough speed to glide for a moment, so it doesn't occur immediately after coming out of the water, but sometimes they travel quite a ways before they shake.  In other words, it is anybodies guess as to when, or even if, they are going to do it.

This particular day, it was raining pretty hard, but it was a shower, so I was hanging in there waiting for it to pass.  I had the camera on a tripod, a rain jacket over my camera, and I was holding an umbrella over me and the camera trying to stay as dry as possible.  All that and trying to film the action at the same time.  It was just by chance that I caught the osprey shaking, but it is one of my favorite images of an osprey.  I thought it ironic that it would try to shake off the water in the pouring down rain.